When a writer can’t write, she has writer’s block. When a walker can’t walk, does she have walker’s block? Or what if the walker only has time for a quick walk, a walk around the block, but she doesn’t have a block to walk around?

Such is the case here in the suburbs. Because most people don’t want to live on cut-through streets, we have plenty of cul-de-sacs but precious few connectors. Instead of walking around the block, with the pleasant circularity that entails, we walk up one side of the road and down another.

To get around this linearity, I’ve come up with loop walks. I cross West Ox, a busy, four-lane road at the west end of our neighborhood, down a slight hill, left into Franklin Farm, through a meadow, along a paved path in a small woods and eventually back to West Ox and into Folkstone again. It isn’t a block, but it is a walk. A walker’s block.